Sleeping Beauty
by The Sugarfaerie
Summary: One day this nightmare will be gone, Katalin knew. I'll wake up and it will all be over. I'll be free. Character study of the hunyak and part four of the 'Fairytale' series.


Yep, this is the Hunyak's fic, or Katalin's I should say. Enjoy! Velma's up next; never fear. I've decided, from what we see in the movie, that Katalin is a ballet dancer. Hence the reference to the ballet of _Sleeping Beauty. _Which is gorgeous, by the way.

Can we just accept that I don't own _Chicago_ and leave it at that? I think so.

Sleeping Beauty 

Katalin was a dancer. No one ever knew it, now. But she was a dancer, yes, a great ballerina, an _artiste._ Everything about her was a dance, and she danced with more beauty than could be believed. Even in prison she mourned beautifully, holding her hands in perfect prayer.

The other girls didn't notice, and Katalin had to admit that she did not blame them. They were preoccupied with other things, such as not getting hanged, and if they noticed her at all it was mostly to mock her poor English. She tried, once, to make herself understood. The woman she approached was red-haired and leant against her cell door smoking a cigarette in a shocking invitation, but she seemed less fierce than the other two murderesses.

"I…" Katalin began, holding her hands forward in what she hoped was an innocent gesture. "Not guilty. No kill. Please…" She let forth a stream of desperate Hungarian, only to be answered by a velvety laugh.

"Get lost, hunyak," the redhead chuckled, breathing a cloud of tobacco smoke into Katalin's face. "Y'know no one can understand a fucking thing y'say." The girl turned her head away, putting the cigarette back in her mouth and dragging as if Katalin was nothing but tiresome dust.

Katalin stopped trying to talk much after that.

She crouched awkwardly on the end of her prison bed, hands clasped, waiting every day to be released. Surely, someone must have told the police by now. They couldn't keep an innocent woman in Cook County Jail, could they? The matron answered her pleas with silence and a sad smile, the girls with laughter, the guards with indifference. There was no point in fighting. She would just have to be patient.

Katalin moved amongst the other inmates like a ghost, barely present. When she approached they stepped aside if they were feeling charitable, and let her navigate her way around them if they were not. One of the rougher girls; Katalin believed she was called Liz, swiped a lit match against Katalin's arm as passed by. Katalin shrieked, clutching at her now scorched sleeve while Liz used the same match to light a cigarette and the red haired girl let out her velvet laugh again.

Katalin saw Liz get locked away for the weekend, yelling words she guessed were curses, but it didn't stop her arm from hurting.

The walls of the cell (not _her _cell, she couldn't bear to think that this world was hers) seemed to crush her, holding her captive among the steel bars that destroyed everything she looked at. She hadn't seen a flower, a blade of grass or any colour apart from that horrible grey for months. _When they let me go, _she thought, _I'll buy the biggest bunch of roses the world has ever seen. I'll cover the walls with green and blue and I'll never wear grey again. _She looked forward to it even now. _I'll go to the opera. I'll dance to Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky and Delibes. _

Her innocence was a subject of great debate. Katalin's attorney (but why would she need a defence if she wasn't guilty?) once managed to drag up a greasy little assistant who knew some Hungarian, but stopped when Katalin didn't confess.

"If you didn't kill him," the assistant asked tentatively in incorrect grammar. "Then who did?"

Katalin shook her head. "I don't know." It was the truth. Josef was dead when she found him. But knowing the killer was their job, not hers. Release me, she wanted to scream. She wanted to scream and cry and yell until the walls around her fell from the sound and she would finally be free, free from this place, this hell.

She performed _Sleeping Beauty _once, with a ballet company in Hungary. An understudy for the role of Aurora, the cursed princess, doomed to sleep for a hundred years. Her costume was a pale pink, frothy thing, with a white gown for the wedding scene. She wore diamonds in her hair. The wedding scene was wonderful, and Katalin prided herself on staying on pointe perfectly during the 'Rose adagio'. But she always wondered about poor princess Aurora and her hundred-year sleep. Did she dream? Were her dreams pleasant or nightmarish? When she woke up, how had things changed?

Katalin realised what silly thoughts these were. Of course Aurora had dreamed. She dreamed and she had nightmares and she had them for a hundred years, trapped in her rose-covered castle.

So it was all just a nightmare, she told herself. Go to sleep. Go to sleep, and one day you'll wake up and it will all have disappeared. One day you'll be free.

But for now Katalin lived in a horrific dream, waiting, wishing for someone to kiss her cheek and let her wake.


End file.
